If I hear one more person repeat robotically “This is not what Freddie Gray’s family wanted”, I will throw up. They are not the only family who lives in West Baltimore. Other residents have every reason to experience their own reaction to the way things are in the city. And that’s what they are doing. Let’s express any form of judgment of what they do but let’s not hide behind the inane appeals to Freddie Gray’s family. It’s obviously not about that family.

Also, the Mayor of Baltimore is not making a great impression on me. All she has to say is “thug this” and “thug that.” In the meanwhile, I’m hearing that she cut funding for public schools and diverted the money to the prison system. So right now maybe she should be talking about what it is that she is planning to offer to the looting and rioting kids that is better than what they are doing at this moment.

There are areas in Baltimore that are really hopeless, really bad. And the Mayor who has done nothing to change that should be speechifying a little less actively.

Is anybody following the coverage of the events in Baltimore on the networks? Fox News is offering coverage that is very sympathetic to the rioters. In the meantime, MSNBC is doing nothing but allowing weirdos like some stupid representative of Rand Paul to self-promote.

I’m staying with Fox News for now because it offers more than the obsessive “OMG, a CVS has been looted” that the other networks are doing.

I love Baltimore and have very fond memories of the months I lived there back in 2009.

Right-wing publications are as dedicated to pushing Putinoid propaganda as the Leftie pro-Putin rag The Nation. Kremlin propaganda is always offered under the sauce of “We really want Ukraine to succeed but let’s keep in mind this string of Putin-generated myths that we will pretend have a connection to reality.”

Here is how The American Interest does it (and mind you, this is just one tiny example):

Throughout last week, armies of coal miners stormed Kyiv’s government district to protest unpaid wages and call for the sacking of Ukraine’s energy minister.

Of course, there were no “armies of coal miners.” The “coal miners” are actors whom we have already seen appear in Russian news segments as bus drivers from Lugansk, separatists in Gorlovka, persecuted Russian-speakers in Donetsk, etc. The moment I saw the very first newscast about the “protesting coal miners”, I immediately recognized one of them as the fake protester in my native city of Kharkiv from last year. (There are no coal mines anywhere around Kharkiv, in case you are wondering.)

Russian news sources hire these people to pose for newscasts. There is a million and one websites that are tracking every part each actor has played in the past year. All that a journalist needs to find this out is to do some actual research for the article. 

What I find especially curious is how both The Nation and The American Interest repeat pretty much verbatim the same stories that Putin’s media have been promoting in the past couple of weeks. These lazy, overpaid journalists are so unprofessional that they just repeat stupidly whatever idiotic line is being fed to them by the much more capable Russian propagandists.

I finally saw the names of the people who will be contributing to the edited volume for which I’m writing an article, and those are some famous names. And I mean, really famous names.

Editors of such volumes want their book to be successful and attract attention. And I obviously can’t bring any value to a volume with the name of my university. To be honest, the university’s name actually detracts from the prestige of the volume. So I need to compensate for the lackluster university name with the quality of my work.

This makes me very happy.